After parting with the Strawhats and Yuta, Tobio and Ganzo had hiked up the little island's steep mountain paths, since Ganzo was confident that Woonan would only ever make his base somewhere very high up. When they'd come across a cave facing the sea, they had stopped in it to rest.
It's from within this cave that they both jolt at the sound of a terrible crash, and look out to see a surging jet of water shooting up into the sky, as wide as Eldoraggo's ship and nearly half as tall as the mountain. It takes the back end of that ship up with it, smashing the boat mostly to pieces, before crashing back down, raining parts and flooding onto the shore.
Tobio, on his feet at the mouth of the cave, watches on with a dull feeling of horror building in the pit of his stomach. "The others are gonna be fine, right?"
"Those lunatics?" Ganzo, sitting on a rock, snorts. "They might not have even noticed."
Tobio hopes so.
X️XX ️ ️
True to form, Zoro, for one, hadn't noticed, because his and Eldoraggo's fight had taken them to high enough ground that the sudden flooding never reached him. Usopp and Treva, though, are a different business.
With Treva under one arm, Usopp had led their pursuers into the jungle, where he proceeded to remain a hair's breadth ahead of them. Through trickery, obfuscation, and use of the environment, he had managed to escape, dodge, and weave himself and Treva out of the way of fists, bullets, and sharp implements.
It's as he's hurtling down a relatively clear jungle path of dirt, pulling on stray branches with his free hand as he goes so that they smack the Eldoraggo Pirates that get too close in the face, that Treva perks up.
"We should climb up that tree," she says, pointing at a tree just up ahead. Treva had gone limp when Usopp picked her up and had since been happy to do nothing of very much note, so Usopp frowns.
He's about to prompt her for an explanation, but then he hears a horrible crash in the distance.
"Right!" Usopp concurs, strained, and gets them up to the top of the tree.
The Eldoraggo Pirates chase them, of course, and begin to climb up after Usopp and Treva, but before Usopp can properly panic about it, a flash flood washes them all away. Screaming and burbling, the Eldoraggo Pirates are dragged along with the water as it recedes again, out to the natural shoreline.
"We'll have a while until they catch up again," Treva tells Usopp, and then she reaches into her duffel bag to rummage around in it.
From somewhere else on the island, Eldoraggo roars, and a beam shoots up into the sky. With an air of expectation about her, Treva holds out an old sock with a rock in it to Usopp.
X️XX ️ ️
Golass heaves himself and the weird brat, the brat by the scruff of his coat, roughly out of the water and onto a flat surface of stone, some ways higher up on the island's topography than the beach. They'd been abruptly washed away by the sea flooding onto the shore, and both cough up brine, on their knees but still breathing. Not a moment sooner, the tide reverses course, back out to the ocean.
"Woah," says the brat. He beams up at Golass. "For a second there, I really thought I was a goner! Thanks for helping me out, Mister!"
Golass grits his teeth. He'd thrown away his pride and any scruples he'd had as a swordsman a long time ago, but still, instinct hadn't allowed him to let a child die, no matter how annoying and no matter how dirty he'd been fighting. It's a line Eldoraggo hadn't yet seen fit to pay Golass to cross. Not explicitly.
"Don't thank me," Golass grouses, irritated and strangely ashamed of himself. "I didn't do it for you."
"Okay!" Yuta accepts immediately, and promptly, he attacks Golass's head with his wooden sword.
Golass yelps and blocks.
Seriously, Golass demands, within the privacy of the head that Yuta had failed to bash in. What is this kid's problem?!
X️XX ️ ️
The explosion of water and wood had thrown Luffy and Nami into the air, but Luffy, acting quickly, had flung one arm around Nami's middle and the other to anchor onto the unexploded end of the ship by the base of the mast. He managed to slingshot the pair of them back onto the deck, and as the tide violently beaches the half-ship, open now to the air like a dollhouse, Luffy and Nami try to get their bearings. Luffy looks around, braced for a fight, while Nami checks to make sure her bag of treasure is unharmed. Water displaced by the surge briefly rains down on them, and when it clears, there's a man with a skull for a head standing stock still in front of the forecastle.
Luffy puts himself, with a purpose about him, in between Nami and Skullface.
"Are you the possessed guy?" Luffy asks him, gamely.
Rather than answering, the presumably possessed guy raises one hand, palm out. Luffy is moving before he's even fully registered it, an arm again around Nami and the other around the mast, leveraging his and her weight to swing them around the edge of the wrecked deck planks and onto the mast's other side. Nami yelps, but Luffy gets them both to safety near the ship's far rails, and not a moment too soon.
A strange, blue-ish slash of energy slices through the air and at roughly where they'd been before, past the mast just beside where Luffy had anchored his arm to it. The energy blast lances out over the open sea, into the beyond.
Luffy's arm snaps back into place, and he doesn't waste any more time. To distract Skullface from Nami and give her an opening to sneak off, Luffy charges Skullface, already winding up to punch him.
Skullface watches Luffy get closer, unblinking, until the last second, when he jumps back to get away. Having put himself so close to the forecastle, that means that his body has to twist unnaturally, so that he can reorient himself to land vertically against the forecastle's wall. Luffy's fist leaves a splintering hole in the wood of the deck where Skullface had been, but he doesn't pause to admire it.
Luffy retracts one arm like a yoyo, braces himself, and pitches the other at Skullface all in one smooth motion. Skullface, who'd only been on the wall for a fraction of a second, kicks off of it to dodge, but Luffy had been ready for that. Luffy doesn't make contact with the wall at all; just behind Skullface, he reels his arm back and latches onto the scruff of his coat, like a fishhook.
Luffy pulls Skullface in like a mechanical anchor and prepares his other hand for another punch. It seems to connect, and Skullface's neck buckles under the weight that's slammed into the side of his face, but it doesn't appear to bother him overmuch. A shock of energy pulses out like a dome all around Skullface, and Luffy has to spring back just to avoid being shoved by the full brunt of it.
Skullface straightens his posture, no worse for wear. But Luffy doesn't see Nami anywhere on the deck anymore, and Skullface doesn't immediately go on the offensive again.
Luffy and Skullface consider each other. Luffy takes the opportunity to fix his hat.
"What's your deal, anyway?" Luffy asks him, raising his voice to be heard over the distance between them, and perhaps also over the possession.
Skullface's jaw works like hinges that have been rusted over, jerky and stilted. "Trea… sure…"
Luffy hopes that that's not the only way Skullface can talk. Fortunately, he coughs, spiritedly enough that Luffy begins to suspect he might hack up a lung. He doesn't, and then, after one final croak, he goes on.
"Treasure," Skullface repeats, voice guttural and scratchy. "What else is there?"
"Stuff," Luffy posits. His arms drop to his sides. He shrugs.
Skullface gives the impression that if he could, he would cock a brow. "Oh?"
Luffy beams, warming up to the topic. "Yeah, like meat!"
Skullface laughs at him, hollow and rickety like bones rattling. It's the only way a skull can laugh at all, Luffy supposes.
"I can't tell if you're joking," Skullface admits.
And then Skullface flings another energy blast at Luffy, who has to dive sideways to avoid it.
X️XX ️ ️
Nami, who had climbed up the mast of the Eldoraggo Pirates' ship, squints down at the fight below from the crow's nest, leaning over the rail with one hand to brace by. With the other hand, she's still lugging around her sack of stolen gold.
"I'm serious!" she can hear Luffy declaring from the deck, where Skullface's blast had just missed him. Luffy rolls with his own dive to get back to his feet, and he extends his arm into an unnaturally long punch. "Seriously!"
"Such a short-sighted, ephemeral concern," Skullface cackles, throwing his head back. Luffy's fist sails past, through where it had been. "Gold and jewels, boy, are far more valuable than the fleeting needs of living flesh."
Nami scowls. That better not be what people hear when she speaks.
Luffy, whose priorities are not only different to Nami's but mostly, also, really dumb, frowns at Skullface. "Those things are mostly only good for buying other things, though. Like meat."
Nami facepalms. Skullface does some more laughing.
"Buying things?" Skullface repeats, incredulous. "There isn't anything else I need."
"That doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun," Luffy observes.
"Fun isn't anything to do with it."
Luffy stares at Skullface like he's a math problem, which for Luffy, really might as well be the same thing as staring at Skullface like he's a set of alien runes. "You lost me."
"So young," Skullface taunts. "So foolish." He gestures grandly to himself with both hands. "This man must have been young himself, at one point, but I wouldn't know of it. I will tell you, however, that he was foolish. Brash and careless, short-sighted. His crewmates warned him about trying to steal my treasure, but did he heed them?" Another cackle. "I'll let you guess!"
"Even if you say you don't care about fun, you sure like to talk," Luffy complains.
Skullface then launches himself at Luffy in a burst of blue-ish energy, fist-first.
Luffy braces for impact, and when Skullface's punch makes contact with Luffy's torso, it sinks and stretches back like a pit trap. Luffy flings his arms out to grab onto the rails on either side of the ship, and, using them for anchors, he wrings himself like a towel.
Nami winces. Luffy's torque is a hell of a crushing force.
Skullface, though, doesn't seem overly inconvenienced, even as his arm bends and he's bodily slammed into the deck. When Luffy releases the rails and springs away from him, into the air, Skullface only sits up and holds his arm out to his side. It crunches, nauseatingly, back into roughly the shape an arm ought to be.
While Luffy is still airborne, with Skullface's other hand, Skullface directs another energy blast at him. Luffy extends his own arms to catch onto the crosstree, which he uses to swing out of the way.
He's a monkey, alright, Nami thinks, dry, but as the blast pierces a hole through the mainsail, it gives her an idea. Leaving her bag of gold safe in the basket of the crow's nest, she vaults the crow's nest's railing and climbs onto the rigging, wary of the fight below and any stray shots.
Skullface does keep shooting, even as Luffy arcs around the mast, but Luffy's trajectory takes him far enough and he's going fast enough that Skullface keeps missing. As Luffy swings back around, he only picks up momentum, and he leans into it to try to hit Skullface with a flying tackle.
As he barrels at Skullface, Luffy yells, nonsensically, in askance, "Aren't you tired of this guy too?!"
"Just who are you talking to, boy?" Skullface crows, steadying himself, hands up in front of him like he's preparing to catch a ball. Like that, he catches Luffy by the shoulders as Luffy rams into him, sending Skullface skidding back and the wood of the deck's planks splintering.
Luffy, still holding onto the mast one-handed, pulls himself back. Skullface, still holding onto Luffy, goes with him.
Skullface's feet leave the deck, but he smirks at Luffy, blue energy gathering in his hands. Luffy grits his teeth, lets go of the mast, and uses the force of his limbs snapping back to their usual length in the air to squirm and kick Skullface off of himself. With a mostly upside down dropkick to Skullface's stomach, Luffy successfully separates the two of them, and they both go careening in different directions, Skullface father up into the sky and Luffy down over the ocean.
"Not to you!" Luffy shouts back, annoyed. "So stay out of it!"
Skullface still tries to blast Luffy. It nicks Luffy's side, but he manages to grab onto the ship's railing and sling himself away from the worst of it.
While this is all happening, Nami busies herself with loosening the knots of rope keeping the mainsail up. If she can drop it on top of Skullface, it could give her and Luffy an opening to escape.
Or, at least, it could give Nami an opening to escape. She gets the feeling that Luffy has a bone to pick, now, and won't be convinced to leave well enough alone.
Confirming this, as he lands on the deck, Luffy goes on, "This skull guy sucks!"
"A waste of effort!" Skullface calls from above, in freefall. "Even if he could hear you, what reason does a man like this have to listen?"
Skullface crashes onto the deck, landing on his legs but with a terrible cracking of bone. Still, he simply stands back to his full height and dusts himself off, smug and no worse for wear. Luffy eyeballs him with a wary dislike.
"All he had to live for, then, was the raiding and pillaging," Skullface recalls, conversational. "A crew of artless brutes, the lot of them. But the others did have the sense to warn him about my treasure, you know, and my reputation. He didn't listen to them, boy, so why ought he listen to you?"
"Well," Luffy says, mulling it over. He scratches the back of his head. "For one, I'm right."
Skullface laughs heartily, but still with a menace to it, almost a meanness. It's a petty laugh, low and self-satisfied, and it reminds Nami far too much of Arlong and his men. Of other pirates she'd swindled, less cautious than Arlong but just as self-serving. It's what most pirates are like, in Nami's experience.
Nami scowls and keeps loosening knots.
Skullface palms his skinless maxilla one-handed, then pushes his hand up his frontal bone to right his bicorn hat. "You've a mouth on you, I'll give you that. But you're barking up the wrong tree. With so little to live for then, there's nothing, certainly, that could tempt this man to face the consequences of his stupidity now." He nods to Luffy. "I've little interest in fighting you. If you hand over the gold, I'd be happy to let you, the girl, and whoever else you're with leave here unharried."
Nami's head swivels to goggle at Luffy and Skullface below. Luffy, to Nami's knowledge, doesn't actually have that much of a grasp on the process by which currency is exchanged for goods and services, and his attitude to the whole business has been broadly laissez-faire. She wouldn't be surprised if he accepted an offer like that.
You better not! she scolds him internally.
But it isn't anything for Nami to worry about, it turns out. Luffy's eyes narrow at Skullface, considering, but absolutely not of any offer Skullface has made to him. Rather, Nami realizes, Luffy is connecting his own set of dots, which she's sure nobody on the planet really cares about except him and maybe Zoro.
"Hey," Luffy says, his tone dangerously even. "What happened to this guy's crew?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Skullface prompts. If he had eyebrows, he'd have raised them both. "After I took control of his body, I killed them all."
Luffy punches Skullface in his skull-face.
X️XX ️ ️
Note: This fight scene is giving me trouble, so heads up that the next chapter might be a bit late.
Also, I won that contest I was in, so thank you to anyone who voted! And thank you for reading this far!